strange Mame problem

[SammyLJ]

So I have been running Mame 0.146 since i have all the roms for it. It has been working fine. Out of nowhere, mame will no longer load and all it does is cause a windows error and wants to send an error report. Anyone know what i can do to fix this?

[DaOld Man]

mame.exe might be corrupted. Download a new exe file and try it.

[Gatt]

I'd also recommend doing a full hard drive scan with scandisk,  and downloading a tool to read the SMART status of your drives.  While it is possible for a bit to flip,  it's unlikely.  Commonly random file corruption means impending hard drive failure.

If it is,  and you don't handle that now,  in a couple weeks you'll try to boot and fail,  and everything on the drive will be lost.

[SammyLJ]

I shut the PC down and re booted, it now works. Dont know why. Also some of the drivers will drop and reappear when i reboot.
Crazy thing is that this is a new 1T harddrive that i bought just for my mame project

[rCadeGaming]

1TB?  100G should be plenty for MAME.  A smaller solid-state drive will run faster and be much better for MAME.

Use that big guy in an HTPC or something.

[BadMouth]

1TB?  100G should be plenty for MAME.  A smaller solid-state drive will run faster and be much better for MAME.

Use that big guy in an HTPC or something.

What advantage does a SSD drive offer when it comes to MAME other than a fast boot time for your cab?

MAME isn't the only emulator.
It's pretty common for people with full romsets for most consoles to have 2-3TB drives in their cabs.

The GD-Rom(NAOMI) & hard drive based arcade games eat up space quickly.
Full sets of optical-drive based console games take up a ridiculous amount of space.
The high quality video previews I'm using on my cab eat up 20GB and my setup is limited to arcade games.  (had to have higher quality for the sound quality)
If someone is running Hyperspin and has themes and video previews for every game on every console, that takes up a major chunk of space.
 
My current build is limited to only working arcade games and the emulators folder weighs in at around 150GB.
I also have The PC versions of Super Street Fighter IV AE (8GB) & Street Fighter X Tekken (4GB).
I could probably squeak by with a 256GB SSD, but it wouldn't leave a whole lot of room for future expansion.

[rCadeGaming]

Ok, ok.  You're right, with other emulators you could need a lot more space, but he just said it was for a MAME project and all I said was that 100GB should be plenty for MAME.  With a full ROM set and only the select CHD's for games you want, that should be true, with space left over for front end stuff.

I'm using real hardware for consoles, and he didn't mention anything about other consoles.

As for an SSD, a quick boot time is very nice on a cab, and some CHD games can take quite a while to load, which an SSD should help with.  It should help with load times in anything.  Running the OS from an SSD also gives a performance boost, as the page file can be accessed much quicker, acting as an effective boost to virtual RAM.